Module 5: Professional Practice. Week 1 - Communities of Practice

Wow, I can't believe it's been six months since I posted anything on here! That needs to change...

 

Wenger, E. (1999) Learning as Social Participation

Wenger states that "the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework and exercises. Yet in our everyday experience, learning is an integral part of everyday life. It is part of our participation in our communities and organisations."

He then clarifies that "the problem is not that we do not know this, but rather that we do not have very systematic ways of talking about this familiar experience... We pay attention to what we expect to see, we hear what we can place in our understanding, and we act according to our world views."

To sum up, Wenger suggests that "perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention when we choose to meddle with it on the scale on which we do today".

Lave, J. (1996) Teaching, as Learning, in Practice

Advocates a move away from the perception of learning as an 'individual, psychological phenomenon' towards an understanding of learning as a 'social, collective' phenomenon. Also challenged the assumption that decontextualised, 'formal', classroom learning was 'good' and that informal, contextualised learning (such as apprenticeships) was 'bad'.

Lave has previously argued against the assumption that teaching is a necessary precondition for learning. His research into apprentice tailors also showed that far from just learning how to reproduce existing practices, apprentices "were learning many complex "lessons" at once" - e.g. about social divisions and identities in Liberian society.

Lave's research into apprenticeship suggested that "learning is the more basic concept, and that teaching (transmission) is something else. Indeed, whole apparatuses of explanation for learning become merely cultural artifacts about teaching - in need of explanation - when learning is taken to be the basic concept."

Lave's belief: "if there is no other kind of activity except situated activity, then there is no kind of learning that can be distinguished theoretically by its "de-contextualisation"". Lave suggests three ways to conceptualise learning differently:

1. a need to reverse the 'polar values' of differing educational power for schooling and "other" forms of education (i.e. school is 'good', apprenticeships are 'bad')
2. a reversal of the research into learning to shift the focus from teachers to learners
3. a view of learning as a socially situated activity

 

What is a theory of learning?

Martin Packer proposed that a theory of learning consists of three kinds of stipulations: 

1. Telos: a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as a goal-directed activity). Encourages a focus on the trajectories of learners as they change rather than the educational goals set by societal / cultural authorities. E.g. for apprentice tailors the telos was not simply learning to sew, rather it might be described as becoming a respected, practicing participant among other tailors, ultimately becoming so imbued with the practice that others in turn become part of their practice. The subjects and the world with which they were engaged mutually constituted each other. This might also be defined as "constructing identities in practice".

2. Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as 'learners' and 'things to be learned').

3. Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.

Different epistemologically-based theories depend on the variable answers to two questions:

1. Where does reality lie (in the world or in the subject)?
2. How can we come to know it (depending on where "it" is)?

"How is the objective world socially constituted, as human beings are socially produced, in practice?"

Conventional views on learning vs views derived from social practice theory

Conventional views would suggest that learning through apprenticeship creates "marginalised learners, engaged in a disorderly process of rote reproduction of existing practice. But the view derived from social practice theory is that apprentices are engaged in a long term project as persons becoming experts known for their learned practice.

What if...

We took the collective social nature of our existence so seriously that we put it first, so that crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamental project subjects engage in?

Crafting identities is a social process, and becoming more knowledgeably skilled is an aspect of participation in social practice. By such reasoning, who you are becoming shapes crucially and fundamentally what you "know". "What you know" may be better thought of as doing rather than having something - i.e. knowing rather than acquiring or accumulating knowledge of information. This is related to Cook and Brown's separation of 'knowledge' and 'knowing', where the latter constitutes the application of the former.

What is teaching?

If learning, rather than teaching, is taken as the fundamental phenomenon and understood principally as "the identity-making life projects of participants in schools", then teaching is a "cross-context, facilitative effort to make high quality educational resources truly available for communities of learners. Great teaching in schools is a process of facilitating the circulation for school knowledgeable skill into the changing identities of students".

Why is it that most of us are able to remember great teachers, but do not have routine was to talk about what great teaching is?

If teachers teach in order to affect learning, the only way to discover whether they are having effects and if so what those are, is to explore whether, and if so how, there are changes in the participation of learners learning in their various communities of practice.